Ophthalmic Medical Technicians Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($34,210) to the 90th ($60,810). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 76,520 Ophthalmic Medical Technicians jobs in May 2024, which is 0.05% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in South Dakota, where the location quotient is 1.94, meaning the occupation holds 1.94 times its national share of local jobs. Florida employs the most people outright, 7,160 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 26.7% of the national total.

One in ten workers in this field earns $34,210 or less, and one in ten earns $60,810 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 1.8 to 1 and the annual gap is $26,600. The mean ($45,360) versus median ($44,080) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Minnesota at $60,810; the jobs leader is Florida:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Ophthalmic Medical Technicians stands number 311 by employment and number 652 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations, the group median wage is $98,340 across 71 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 55% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.8% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 26 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $44,080, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 5,760 jobs, 7.5% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $39,640 a year, against $66,230 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Ophthalmic Medical Technicians paycheck, gross, is $1,695 every two weeks on an annual $44,080, which is $3,673 a month and $848 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($37,100) to the 75th ($49,730) is worth $12,630 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $48,488 would sit between the median ($44,080) and the 75th percentile ($49,730), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $37,100, is $6,980 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations

Sibling occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations: Magnetic Resonance Imaging Technologists, Chiropractors, Health Information Technologists and Medical Registrars, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Workers, All Other, Emergency Medicine Physicians, Healthcare Diagnosing or Treating Practitioners, All Other. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.